A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of - Etheses - Queen Margaret ...

indictment of a culture and educational system which offer disabled young people few
opportunities to identify themselves as fully human beings. If we consider Sarah „lucky‟ to
have developed this friendship, to have found somebody she was able to talk with, then we
accept that this is not the usual case for most disabled young people.
While the accounts of Ash, Rose, Jennie and Sarah above highlight the value felt by disabled
people in having other disabled people to relate to, none of these in themselves offer insight
into ways in which the situation of oppression may be surmounted. The accounts considered
here so far may even suggest the collective involvement of disabled people in self-
oppression. If acceptance of disability identity means acceptance of the disabled role then
talking with other disabled people in similar situations, while comforting, does not produce
transformative action. There may be felt an instinctive sense of injustice, but also expressed
is a lack of knowledge of how to respond to this injustice other than by living with it. If
responses that are not critically transformative give assent to existing structural relations,
even if they are ironic or knowing, they are complicit in preserving existing structures of
domination.
Power
Mary talked about her experiences after starting work as an access auditor for an
organisation of disabled people in West Yorkshire in the early 1990s:
147
Just interacting with other disabled people in a more kind of radical environment
made a difference… and… you know… well, I did kind of mention that I‟d been to
special school… but I wasn‟t really disabled… at which people just burst out
laughing, of course… oh, yeah, Mary, right… and then I went to a conference at the
university and… which was around how to make education more accessible for
disabled people… and I listened to Tarquin... who became a close friend… and he
spoke about the social model… I mean, I‟d heard about the social model… but not
in the depth that Tarquin actually described it… and for me, you see, it wasn‟t just a
matter of accepting this… it was more sort of an active embracing… of the concept
of being a person with an impairment… and moving from that level of political
consciousness to thinking well, you‟re not… you know… you‟re not a person with a
disability… disability is something that‟s actively done to you… so it was at that
point, actually listening to Tarquin… I was on the road to being quite radicalised,
anyway, but he was the kind of… (l.1.377ff.)